Thursday, July 19, 2012

Drainolith - Fighting! 8.5

Drainolith’s
‘Fighting’ stumbles around in an incoherent mess. Those drum machines have no
idea how to keep a beat. Good thing the singer appears to just remember what he’s
supposed to sing off the top of his damaged mind. Everything here is so gone,
like every song took a bunch of drugs and pretended it was sober. Nope, the
songs fool no one. Something is clearly off in this aural environment. Hits
land nowhere near where they are supposed to, the guitar sounds like some kind
of Bill Orcutt leftover cut, and the whole thing is doused in sheens of
frustrated No Wave anger. Put simply, I love this album.

The
opener is pop friendly in comparison to what follows. Still, the drum machine
tries in vain to keep up with a non-existent tempo. Alexander Moskos mutters
some stuff that is in English but otherwise remains intelligible. Here is where
the Royal Trux vibe is most strongly felt. Parts of this even veer towards a ‘rock-like’
sound. Yet it remains too idiosyncratic for such pigeon-holing. ‘You Paid for
It’ references rock in between its more industrial synthesizer work. Eventually
this industrial sound overtakes the album in the latter half with the drunken ‘Southern
Eye’ which barely feels conscious of what’s going on around it. It ends the way
it should with an elongated synthesizer solo going nowhere for roughly half the
song.

Rarely
is there an album this completely free of convention. Even noise albums have a
certain template. Everything on here works to subvert the idea of structure. Love
the disorder. Embrace the chaos.